Despite working to divest most of its shareholdings in – mainly software – partners, IBM Corp is buying more and more hardware in, and several companies have jumped up this week to announce that they will be making key products for IBM. Interphase Corp of Dallas has a contract to develop a network co-processor chip for Micro Channel Architecture-based RS/6000 servers. The network co-processor, known as the 4727 NC, is designed to offload the processing of network-related management tasks, freeing up the server’s central processing unit’s time for other tasks. The 4727 NC is $6,000 and will be available from Interphase next month; the company claims that by using multiple co-processors, the RS/6000 achieves one of the fastest levels of Network File System operations per second in the industry for a Unix uniprocessor. The 4727 NC is the third member of Intephase’s Network CoProcessor line, after the original VMEbus one and a new SBus one. And Irvine, California-based Corollary Inc has granted IBM worldwide marketing rights to a customised version of the Corollary Connection Station multiprotocol communications server under an OEM agreement. The station links serial and parallel devices to host systems on an Ethernet network and IBM will offer it as an Ethernet-based asynchronous communications system to provide multi-host links for the RS/6000 without taking slots in the backplane. It will also be sold as a TCP/IP communications server as the IBM 7318 Serial Communications Network Server. And San Diego, California-based Excalibur Technologies Corp has introduced the Excalibur Text Retrieval Server and Excalibur Text Retrieval Library, and IBM will market them as part of SearchManager for AIX and OS/2. The products automatically index text in any computer-generated data, including ASCII text, Standardised Generalised Mark-up Language documents and word processor files. The Excalibur products will also be offered for Solaris, HP-UX and OSF/1 Unix.
